Low power consumption box for home ESXi server

[wallport]

Hi, I currently run a home server (ESX 5) on an old desktop PC but I calculate this is now costing £120+ (I reckon its about 80w) in power per year and I cant justify it. I want something with really low power consumption and having retired, no longer have any company affiliation to help with getting licences. I am happy to continue to run my ESXi 5 licence but will modern hardware be compatible?

Will one of these fanless micro PC's work or require drivers which don't exist?

Can I get a free licence for a later version and will this require running vCenter (I am currently using the vSphere client)?

Appreciate any help

Wallport

[RA5]

Check out reddit /homelab 

[Lalegre]

Hey @wallport,

Take a look to the IntelNUC ones, maybe they fit your power consumption requirements, there are bunch of models and series.

[Krech]

Hello,

i use three intel nucs as a 2 node vsan cluster.

One of them is the management esxi for DNS, vCenter and Witness, the another one for the 2 node vSAN Cluster. 

However you should be careful, some intel nucs has only one hard disk. That's why I have to leave the case open 🙂

But you can use 1 or more intel nucs with a qnap as shared storage.

[scott28tt]

Download link for vSphere Hypervisor 7 (ESXi 7): https://customerconnect.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi7

[wallport]

Thanks Scott/all. Am now running an ASRock Beebox-S bought on ebay for £100 with ESXi 7.2. Its stable except for the USB NIC I added which drops out every couple of days. Got some questions out about this and may need to buy one with a different chipset.

...and this server idles at 10w running my firewall VM!